Posted
by
timothy
on Monday June 03, 2013 @02:11AM
from the this-time-make-them-creepier dept.

CowboyRobot writes "This week NASA kicks off its second Sample Return Robot Challenge, in which teams compete for a chance to win $1.5 million. Participants must demonstrate a self-operated robot capable of locating and collecting geologic samples from diverse terrain. Eleven teams from the U.S. and overseas gather for the challenge from June 5 through 7 at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Mass. The Sample Return Robot competition is part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program launched by the Space Technology Mission Directorate, which develops and tests hardware for use in NASA's future missions. NASA said the goal of the challenge is to encourage innovation in autonomous navigation and robotics technologies, which the agency could potentially use to explore a "variety of destinations in space" and in "industries and applications on Earth.""

You'll earn a lot more than $1.4 million if you build a robot that can pull weeds or kill bugs. Every farmer in the United States would love to quit buying herbicides and pesticides and say "Look at me, I'm organic"!

We already have them. Modern tractors have GPS guidance to spray pesticides or herbicides or harvest crops essentially automatically. The driver is more or less just watching out in case something goes wrong.

They already exist, they're called 'geese'. In China for centuries flocks of geese have been trained to eat weeds, and not food crops. Children would drive them through fields on regular schedules. I think tractors and glycophosphate are used exclusively on the large farms, but I'd be surprised if the smaller farms didn't still use them.